The Handman's Tale

The Misogynistic Horror of Being Asked to Respectfully Demonstrate Some Gratitude

Rollo Tomassi points out something that — because of its ubiquity among professed accusations coming from women — should be obvious on its face: females assert revulsion to hearing anything whatsoever about how the sexual marketplace is currently stacked against men, because it engages fear in women that they will be forced to bear the children of men with whom they don’t want to reproduce.

The image above from The Handmaid’s Tale is emblematic of one of the most ludicrous and yet oft-declared canards among female social activists: that it is only feminism and a vague but progressive social order (that never credits who does the enforcing of that order) that prevents a return to a mythical past during which female human beings were seen as having no other purposes beyond providing sexual favors, gestating children and doing their chores.

No one in our culture besides criminals is actually forcing women to bear children, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that females more often behave in sexually coercive manners, but, succumbing to propaganda, many women certainly do fear supposed baby bondage – and thus accuse men of having the motivation to enslave them. Consistently ignored in this delusional formation is recognition that, were men to truly desire to create or transition to a social order in which women were subject to involuntary sexual and gestational servitude, women would be powerless to prevent men from implementing such a system. Therefore, it’s evident on its face that men have no designs to force women to fornicate and reproduce against their will. As much as men love sex, they actually desire being desired. Female paranoia about this is thus much more reflective of baseless fears than any real potential danger of such repression.

Reflective of the fact that men do not want women to be subject to either involuntary sexual intercourse or assigned birthing duties is that men perform the vast majority of all enforcement roles not only in our legal system but in the military that sustains that legal system. Men, for example, never needed to be persuaded by women that prohibition of rape should be enacted or enforced.

A corollary dynamic that should always be paired with any fears of a Handmaid’s Tale or Stepford Wives dystopia, though, is the much more justifiable comparable fear for men: that they are indeed collectively coerced into providing a whole range of services to females (societal organization, protection, invention, creation, maintenance, repair, etc.) without requirement on the part of females to provide any commensurate compensation. And, again, men provide the bulk of the enforcement mechanisms behind the Family Court Systems that perpetuate female legal domination over males.

In the past half century, women have demanded increasing freedom, independence, privileges and exemption from feeling any obligation to provide what men want from them — further expecting that men should grant each associated fantasy — all while men continue to be expected to perform all traditional male roles.

Women openly take men for granted but refuse to allow men to even contemplate taking females for granted.  Women expect men to provide protection, provision and access to material luxuries; they even expect men to provide sex on female terms, which includes treating three quarters of all men as if their only purpose is to provide menial labor, because only the top 5-20% of men are deemed worthy sexual partners for 80-90% of the female population. 

Men are permitted to expect nothing.  Until men insist that this changes — which will require men to develop significant gender solidarity — men will remain weak, and women will continue to suffer at least as much as men do from this weakness (it is relatively inescapable that no degree of expanded privilege has so far diminished female discontent). 

Witness the world falling apart all around us. This is occurring due to a variety of political, social and philosophical dynamics — from tyrannical intentions to deteriorating attention spans and willful ignorance — but the widening intersexual chasm plays no small role in societal decline. As men, we’re confronted with an imperative to refrain from just looking out for our individual selves. If we want legacies, we have to recognize that, if we bequeath a world of increasing disconnection and decreasing presence of pair-bonding intimate relationships for most men, our offspring and theirs will live out their lives in a world characterized by emptiness and devolving chaos.

In The Handmaid’s Tale and similar feminist tropes, women and weak men are encouraged to believe it’s evil to expect adult females to provide their traditional share of the gender-roles agreement but righteous for stingy women to expect their male counterparts to fill in the tremendous gaps existing between supposed demands for equal participation and the preferential-occupation roles the vast majority of women actually choose to inhabit (no noticeable complaints about glass ceilings in the realms of garbage collection or roofing jobs). For the most part, women have predominantly concentrated their workplace participation into desk-job roles that in previous generations had been reserved for men who had become disabled while working in truly dangerous occupations.

Men, we’ve been hypnotized into believing a lie: that there’s a scarcity of available females. The truth of the matter is that unattached women always far outnumber unattached men, so we’re the ones in relatively scarce supply; they need us more than we need them. In the ancient pagan Greek play Lysistrata, women banded together to achieve political power by conducting a mass sexual strike. One reason rises above all others to prevent women from ever conducting such an exercise: unconscious awareness that such a strike would be far more taxing for women than for men, as well as that it would draw stark attention to the fact that sex and reproduction are the only real leverage women have in the war between the sexes.

But sex and reproduction are leverage also possessed by men, who have a great many other ongoing contributions they could mobilize to emphasize just how dependent women are on men. In fact, just a couple days of male striking — to the point of doing no electrical work, no power-plant servicing, no plumbing, no auto repair, no assembly-line work, no construction, no trucking or engineering, no male policing or firefighting — would be enough to make a point so long-lasting it might approach permanence. In our current set of intersexual dynamics, women have been collectively engaged in a strategy of combining full withholding with generalized threatening to strike. Our only real obstacles in conducting a definitive strike-type lesson for all women in our lives would be (a) those men currently benefitting from being in that small percentage who get the sexual favors of the 80+% of women who currently consider all other men unworthy, and (b) those men willing to jump through any hoop necessary to get married or get laid — no matter how low they have to stoop to do so.

Men may never have the stones to stand shoulder-to-shoulder to pull off something like that but could at the very least exhort each other to start openly discussing the gender dynamics behind the need for such an action.

Or, alternatively, men, we can keep marching along subservient to our roles in The Handman’s Tale — because too many of us believe getting occasional tail justifies letting women lead us around by metaphorical leashes attached to the rings in our noses.

Right?